Archive for September, 2011

All indications are the the iPhone 5 will launch in October. It is now September 14th. Rumour sites are going hog wild with reports of Sprint employees being denied holidays, the big marketing push the China Telecom plans, Sprint’s pricing plans, and more. Isn’t it about time Apple put us all at ease and finally announced the iPhone 5?

It’s been too long since the iPhone 4, Apple. Time to spill the beans.

The iPhone 5 befuddles me. Historically, Apple has released a new iPhone on a yearly schedule. If rumours are to be believed, the iPhone 5 will be released soon, taking about an extra six months to develop compared to the previous three iPhone designs. Even the iPhone 4, which was a radical design departure, came out on schedule.

So what is it about the iPhone 5 that is taking so long to develop? Insiders and pundits suggest that the iPhone 5 will have the A5 processor that’s also in the iPad 2, so the core CPU is a known quantity. Are they having trouble with heat dissipation perhaps? I’m just guessing. Rumour sites also suggest that the iPhone 5 will have a larger display, but then we also read that the iPhone 5 will not have a larger display. Who to believe? Mixed messages are all we’re getting on this front, but even a larger display doesn’t tell us why we’re getting a six month delay. Especially since the display will probably have the same resolution as the iPhone 4′s Retina display.

The latest rumours are that the iPhone 5 won’t even ship with iOS 5 installed. Developers who have the latest beta are saying that iOS 5 is awesome but isn’t ready for prime time. So put those things together, and you can’t blame iOS 5 for the iPhone 5′s extra development time.

What other features could Apple possibly be adding to this phone? NFC? Hardly rocket science. Frankly I’m flummoxed. Does Apple have another market-shifting product in the works? Something we can’t imagine until it happens? Will the iPhone 5 be one of those products that’ll make Samsung, HTC, and RIM moan in despair?

I was excited when I read that Tweetbot would be integrating Tweet Marker support. Tweet Marker is a service that keeps you in sync between different Twitter clients, so you don’t miss any tweets in your timeline. I didn’t have a Twitter client for the Mac. Up until now I’ve never bothered, precisely because which tweets I’ve read couldn’t be kept in sync. But now they could, so I needed to find a client for the Mac.

I found that Twitterrific was the only Mac client that supported Tweet Marker, which was fine. Especially because it was on sale for just five bucks. So I bought and installed it on my Mac.

I can now report that Tweet Marker doesn’t work very well. The Twitterrific folks replied to my complaining tweets about this by saying that it works for them. Great for them. But no help to me. They pointed out that I have to exit the apps for optimal performance, but that didn’t seem to help much. (It did help a little.) Sometimes it worked going from Twitterrific to Tweetbot. But not if Tweetbot had to load so many tweets that it had to skip some – even if the marker was on a tweet that was not skipped. Going from Tweetbot to Twitterrific was even worse. It just wasn’t reliable.

So now I’m back to a one-client Twitter universe. Back to Tweetbot. I hope the Tweet Marker, Tweetbot, and Twitterrific folks can get this stuff working, because I’d really love to use it.
[Update: Now that I've read this post, I almost want to give Tweet Marker another chance. I'll tell you what happens if I do.]

I’m not the most social of people, I’m not a type A, and I am definitely an introvert. But recently I decided to branch out a bit and go to some social events here in Ottawa. It started at Startup Drinks Ottawa (@OTTStartupoDrink on Twitter), where I met a few people. I didn’t really move from table to table (we only made one such move when the table we were at was getting too crowded), but luckily lots of people wanted to drop by our table. I met some new people and added them to my Twitter stream.

Next up was CocoaHeads Ottawa. They had two very interesting presentations, but there wasn’t a lot of socializing. Maybe that happened at the bar afterwards, but from what I saw, not a lot of people went to that (I didn’t).

Last was Mobile Monday, and it was a great event. One of the organizers was Macadamian, an old employer of mine. I couldn’t believe they’re up to about 170 people now! When I was there, the company was about 25 people in size.

There were several headhunters at the Mobile Monday event, looking for mobile developers. That made me feel good because, you know, I’m a mobile developer.

Much to my chagrin I had to miss the last Startup Drinks Ottawa, but I’ll definitely try to make the next one. There are a lot of interesting people to talk to, even if I’m doing a lot more listening than talking.